screenwritingtips:

If you’re hung up on your first draft because you feel you need a brilliant plot twist, write ‘[BRILLIANT PLOT TWIST GOES HERE]’ and move on. You can fix it later. What matters now is the emotional truth.

This is writing as if in a nutshell. You write as if you’ve done something that you haven’t yet. It’s not just good for in the moment. It’s an excellent tactic for when you decide to change something you’ve already written, instead of going back and rewriting it all, make a short notation of what you want to change and then keep writing as if you’ve already made the changes.

This sounds daft but you’re probably doing it anyway more often than you think. Many of your early scenes are simply long hand versions of this, which you won’t realize until somewhere in the rewriting process.

I’ve still got a point in H&M which started out, ignorantly, as a four page version of [Show that James is obsessive about truth and knowledge because he has been repeatedly and seriously harmed by ignorance and little white lies], it’s now down to a few paragraphs but the scene is still really a placeholder for me while I think of the most effective way to show that. Eventually the real thing will go in but understanding that there are placeholders for things that you need will help you not to cut things when you shouldn’t. I did cut that scene entirely in one draft because I didn’t realize so concretely what it was doing. And then had to add it back in which was kind of a waste of effort.